The recent fossil discovery of a 375-million-year-old fish that could lurch ashore on bony transitional fins - apparently a long-sought missing link between sea creatures and land animals - made a spectacular splash in evolutionary science circles. But it created nary a ripple on the placid American campus of Answers in Genesis, where an enormous museum chronicling the biblical six days of creation is rising fast amid rolling fields.
You might think that creationists, who are rigidly opposed to the concept of evolution, would be a bit rattled by Tiktaalik turning up. But you would mostly be wrong. A big part of the creationist scam is basically about taking gaps in the fossil record and unsolved issues in evolutionary theory and saying, "See? This fancy-pants scientists don't know everything. They can't explain all these gaps."
So wouldn't finding something that fills one of those gaps be a problem for them? Not really. Because now we don't just have a gap between the pre-Tiktaalik link and the post-Tiktaalik one. Now we have two gaps: pre-Tiktaalik to Tiktaalik, and Tiktaalik to post-Tiktaalik. Even more reason to doubt the scientists!
Anderson's article gives a quick sketch of some creationist beliefs.
But what doesn't come out in Anderson's piece is the fact that, despite their reliance on faith, creationists are generally obsessive about documenting that the scientific record really agrees with them. They can't do it by positive demonstration of the pseudoscientific claims. So they mainly rely on trying to debunk real science.
Anderson writes:
Ken Ham, co-founder and president of Answers in Genesis, believed to be the world's largest creationist organization, and most "young-Earth" creationists are as unimpressed by science's finding another piece in the evolutionary puzzle as they are with science's finding the Earth to be 4.5 billion years old.
Using biblical calculations, young-Earth creationists believe the planet is about 6,000 years old; old-Earth creationists believe it could be older. Both, however, take the Bible literally and reject Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory that all life, including human, shares common ancestry and developed through random mutation and natural selection. Evolution enjoys near-universal support among scientists.
Accurate enough on the creationists, so far. But here she falls into a trap:
For creationists, there are no transitional creatures and no doubts. In the Book of Genesis, the biblical calendar of creation is as clear and simple as it is sacred: God created creatures of the sea and the air on Day 5. Land animals and man appeared on Day 6. And all of this, including the creation of Earth, happened about 6,000 years ago.
"Is the Bible the word of God or is it not? If you're going to reinterpret it from ideas outside the Bible, which continue to change, then it's not," said Ham, 54, a former high school biology teacher from Australia, who leads Answers in Genesis' 12-year-old U.S. branch. "The point I make is the Bible's account of creation is so black and white and has not changed, but man's ideas have changed."
Ham is far from alone in that belief. According to nearly a quarter-century of Gallup polls, about half of all Americans consistently agree with the biblical account that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Polling also indicates that a majority of Americans say creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public school biology classes. (my emphasis)
Poll results like the latter seem to give credence to an H.L. Mencken view of the gullibility and shallowness of the average American. But that kind of poll result needs to be examined carefully. Science teachers and creationist activists may be very aware of the distinction between having some discussion of the notion of divine creation in a sociology or religion class, on the one hand, and teaching creationism *as science* in science classes, on the other. But I seriously doubt that's true of a lot of people taking an opinion poll. Unless the questions on the poll specificially pinpoint that choice, it doesn't really tell you that much.
And as far as God creating human beings in the last ten thousand years, it's not unusual - as much as it may dismay Christian fundamentalists or village atheists - for Christians to believe that God created humanity through using natural processes, like evolution. For most believers, it's just not something that troubles them all that much.
And how often do you see newspaper articles discussing the current estimates about the time parameters of the evolution of humans? According to the Smithsonian Institution Web site (I had to look it up myself, and I actually follow the "creationist" news probably more than the average non-scientist):
[T]he oldest fossil evidence for anatomically modern humans [Homo sapiens] is about 130,000 years old in Africa, and there is evidence for modern humans in the Near East sometime before 90,000 years ago.
But it is thought to be about 10,000 years ago that Neandertals (H. sapiens neandertalensis, who were a different subspecies of Homo sapiens than fully modern humans) became extinct, leaving Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens, the earliest fully modern humans, as the sole surviving "homonid" species.
So, while the 10,000-years-old answer may disappoint a lot of high school biology teachers, it's not necessarily such a bad guess. Neither the Menckens nor the flat-earthers should take much comfort from it. And, again, the answers depend a lot on how the questions are formulated.
It's also significant that the school board members in Dover County PA that voted for the pro-creationist rules that were recently struck down in the courts were all defeated for re-election. While it's undoubtedly true that in some school districts, candidates who openly promoted something like that might be elected, in practice creationist candidates tend to very much downplay if not outright hide their views and intentions on that subject. If half the public clearly supported something like that, why would such candidates want to be secretive about it?
The online article she cites in the story - Gone fishin' for a missing link? (A preliminary response) by David Menton & Mark Looy, Answers in Genesis 04/06/06 -. It stresses the uncertainty that shows those scientists aren't nearly so secure a source as the Bible (as interpreted by creationists) on such matters.
But it also makes a pretence at scientific criticism, and this is also important to understand about fundamentalist arguments. They assert the authority of Scripture over science. But they also make a show of how science actually supports their interpretation of the Scriptures. So their position is not just an assertion of the priority of religious beliefs. They also have to promote pseudoscientific thinking in order to make their "science really supports us" argument.
And if a reader is not aware of that aspect of the creationist scam, they might be impressed by the discussion there of Panderichthys, Tiktaalik, the coelacanth and how the muscles in such creatures attaches to the bone structure. They aren't able to make such arguments in peer-reviewed scientific journals, because their arguments won't pass muster. And they usually don't bother to try. Their main goal is not to convince scientists of particular arguments in the field, but rather to promote the methods and assumptions of pseudoscience over those of real science.
In reality, as Anderson quotes Volney Gay of Vanderbilt, a critic of the creationist scam, "There's a suspicion of science and a suspicion of intellectuals in general" among the creationists and their target audience of white Christian fundamentalists.
